I'll try to distill my point. At this time there is no full blown GUI (functonality, eye candy, ease of use, etc.) that is not a pig on Linux.
http://www.xfce.org/
I'm quite willing to concede that the problem might be KDE or Gnome, but since they must reside on X it's hard for me to believe that no one has developed a "full blown" GUI for Linux that does not suck (performance wise - look and feel is obviously a matter or preference) if X were not part of the problem.
X is part of the problem. One of the most glaring problems is the recently introduced Xrender extension. Among other things, it's used for the also-recently-introduced Xft2 (font display). Because it's new, it's not accelerated. For a lot of stuff it isn't a huge hit; in other situations it is.
Most of X is very small, and very fast. Xrender will eventually be optimized and accelerated.
If someone wiser in the ways of code and hardware could explain to me if (and how) that's not true I'd be glad to hear and place the "blame" exclusively at the feet of KDE and Gnome.
GNOME and KDE pay a lot for their eye candy: root window drawn by an application rather than cached in the server, theme engines, alpha blended icons... All of this is currently done in software and isn't well optimized.
But then why is there not an alternative to them that does not drag like a boat anchor on anything but state-of-the-art hardware?
Because optimization is hard?
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